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It is ? I'm not a great fan of ubuntu, but I am using kubuntu right now (ditched debian because I wanted kde 4.2 when it was out) and overall I am happy with it...

Well it would be nice though to see some desktop article here like some benchmarks tests of KDE4 around major distros and pointing out which is 'the best KDE4 distro out there' ... Most people consider ubuntu to be the best gnome distro, but as far as KDE goes opinions are very different...

well, lets see - reports of kde crashes in kubuntu - and seldomly somewhere else. KDE's localization is pretty much complete (and it is complete for languages like german or french), but not in kubuntu - because they 'destroy' the complete kde localization and replace it with the incomplete ubunutu localization.

Linuxmint's KDE (gloria) was very impresive and one of the best kde implementations I have tried to date. Very usable and I know they fixed a lot of the Kubuntu issues along the way. Shame no 64 bit version.

Well, I'm fan of gentoo and while I'musing for the last 5 years the same installation, it's always modern and fast, but such a distro is not the best choice for phoronix tests. While it could be faster than Ubuntu, OpenSUSE etc it needs work to install so is not comfortable when you have a piece of new hardware and want to setup, run and test an OS in a few minutes. So a binary based pre-configured distro is the best choice. So since we have to choose between one million dists the best option is the most popular one and that's Ubuntu.

but ubuntu does not use the most popular desktop and their kernel is heavily patched. Something closer to mainline would be better, because the results could pe transfered for easily.

Well, nothing is perfect, Ubuntu uses one of the two most popular desktop environments but to use KDE or Gnome is not critical for benchmarking. Also, since Ubuntu has a lot of flavours like Kubuntu and Xubuntu you can be pretty sure that the results you see in phoronix.com will be the same between them.
Also, for the heavily patched kernel, well this is more common between the distros than the ice in the arctic and there is a reason for that. OpenSUSE does the same and Mandriva and Fedora etc... even gentoo's default kernel is patched. Also, don't forget that PTS compiles the benchmark apps by itself rather than using the distro's defaults.
The most important thing someone who runs benchmarks should keep in mind is the time and easy of install and setup of the OS he uses.